Evaluating your emergency management inventory process
Joint Commission standard EM.03.01.01, EP 3 requires an annual review of your emergency management inventory process.
This is where you look back at exercises and real events and see if:
- Resources, assets, etc. were managed appropriately
- There were shortcomings and if so, what can be done to better manage them in the future (additional redundancies, etc.)
- There were things you needed that hadn’t been considered in the mix
If you have these elements well in place, use the evaluation process to validate your position. That way, if you run into a surveyor who doesn’t like how you’re managing the process, you can point to the evaluation and say, “This is how we know that our management of this aspect of our EOP is effective because we’ve evaluated our exercises and our actual events and we are quite certain of our abilities.”
Data is the best defense when you encounter a prickly surveyor.
About the Author: Steve MacArthur is a safety consultant with The Greeley Company in Danvers, Mass. He brings more than 30 years of healthcare management and consulting experience to his work with hospitals, physician offices, and ambulatory care facilities across the country. He is the author of HCPro's Hospital Safety Director's Handbook and is contributing editor for Briefings on Hospital Safety. Contact Steve at 
